No abstract

A new species of Graptocarcinus, G. collinsi Vega, is recorded from lower Maastrichtian (Upper Cretaceous) strata assigned to the Arroyo Grande Formation to the south of Rodas (central Cuba). The three specimens available form part of a diverse decapod crustacean fauna currently under study. The new species differs from its Early and Late Cretaceous congener from Mexico, the United States, England, Spain, France, the Czech Republic and the Netherlands in being much wider than long, having a larger mean carapace size, in lacking or having an extremely weak cervical groove and coarse and densely arranged granules on the dorsal carapace.

A new species of raninid crustacean, Vegaranina rivasi sp. nov, is described based on three specimens collected from a Late Cretaceous deposit in central Cuba. Previous studies assigned one of the specimens to Vegaranina precocia (Feldmann, Vega, Tucker, Garcia-Barrera & Avendano, 1996), a species described from the Late Cretaceous of Mexico. However, after collecting the new specimens and recent major revisions of the group, we identified a unique combination of characters in the Cuban specimens that separate them from the other species in the genus.

Sloths were among the most diverse groups of land vertebrates that inhabited the Greater Antilles until their extinction in the middle-late Holocene following the arrival of humans to the islands. Although the fossil record of the group is well known from Quaternary deposits in Cuba, Hispaniola, and Puerto Rico, remains from older units are scarce, limiting our understanding of their evolution and biogeographic history. Here we report the oldest known fossil ground sloth from Hispaniola, represented by an unassociated partial tibia and scapula that are recognized as a single taxon from the late Miocene-early Pliocene of the Dominican Republic. The combination of characters observed on the tibia suggests a close relationship with Megalocnus, otherwise only known from the Pleistocene–Holocene of Cuba. These fossils fill a temporal gap between those previously known from the early Miocene of Cuba and those from Pleistocene–Holocene deposits in the region and provide additional support for a continuous presence of the group in the Greater Antilles since the Oligocene.